 ATHLETIC SHORTS -- a gay agenda? Crutcher explains why gay characters are essential to YA literature in this response to an Iowa book challenge in 2004. CC Copyright © 2004 All rights reserved. Adult Completed Read an Excerpt About his inspiration for "In the Time I Get," the challenged short story and the man who inspired it: "I asked how many of the other group members had been to visit him, he got tears in his eyes and said, "None. It's okay, though. They're scared." And then he gave me a line I used in the story. He said, "You know, the tough part about his disease, beside the fact that it's killing me, is that no one will touch me. I haven't been touched since I entered the hospital." Like Louie in the book, I touched him, and he cried like a baby. In another week he was gone. " Excerpt Why gay characters have a place in YA Lit A statement about the reason for using gay and lesbian characters in material middle schoolers might read. Roughtly ten percent of our population is gay. That means ten percent of middle schoolers are moving into that time when they discover their sexuality and those who are gay and lesbian have to face the matter-of-fact bigotry of those who feel at dis-ease with their sexual wiring. I visit middle and high schools all over this country, about thirty of them per year, and though the only racial epithets I hear happen between same race students, as terms of endearment, I hear the word "faggot" all the time. I believe there will be a time in the not-to-distant future when we look back on this time and the ten or twenty years previous to this in the same way that we now look back on the fifties and sixties at the civil rights movement, when lawmakers were still trying to deny people of color their full rights. I don't mean that to be a political statement, but rather one regarding the atmosphere any gay or lesbian student enters in most middle and high schools, places that reflect the attitude of our country as a whole. When I wrote "In the Time I Get," I had recently experienced the grief of the death of a client from AIDS. He was a guy who had been wreckless all his life; had three children he almost never saw, who were recently removed from their mother because of a drug addiction. The guy discovered what was happening and came back to work in therapy to get the kids back so they could stay together and not be farmed out into foster care. He did amazing work, went back into his own history and acknowledged every mistake and every careless action that put his kids at risk. The rest of the men in his men's group looked up to him for the courage to tell the truth. He was far more impactful to the group than I was as the therapist and group leader. Then he came to treatment one night and announced that he had some bad news. He had AIDS. It was full-blown and all his work was for nothing because it was taking over. You could feel the other men in the group backing away from him, as he spoke. Two days later he was hospitalized and I visited him there. The disease was on fast forward. A week later I went again and when I asked how many of the other group members had been to visit him, he got tears in his eyes and said, "None. It's okay, though. They're scared." And then he gave me a line I used in the story. He said, "You know, the tough part about his disease, beside the fact that it's killing me, is that no one will touch me. I haven't been touched since I entered the hospital." Like Louie in the book, I touched him, and he cried like a baby. In another week he was gone. The other group members were a rugged bunch. Many of them had decided he was "queer" and it was his own damn fault, though many of them had been intraveneous drug users. And they were horribly misinformed about how the disease passes, which was another reason none of them went to visit. In the end, though many of them didn't know it, they lost a hero and he died alone. It is not okay in this country to be a bigot. It may be legal, but it's not okay. Homosexuality is a reality in the world, and it always has been. Though there may be cases in which it's a choice, in the vast majority of cases it is not. It is simply a reality, a toss of the dice. Ask any heterosexual when they decided to be heterosexual. Most will look at you like you're crazy. They didn't decide, they just are. Same for gays. Look, we're either going to be informed in this country, or not. We're either going to be decent in this country, or we're not. We're either going to be compassionate in this country, or we're not. The biblical reference denouncing homosexuality usually goes back to Leviticus. It might be a good idea to read all of Leviticus to see what else that book of the Old Testament calls sins, and what it prescribes that we do about them. When we turn away from tough material in stories that kids face every day in real life, we take ourselves off the short list of people to turn to. Kids would much rather we found ways to discuss those tough issues than to pretend they don't exist. They will always come up in real life, it seems to me we want to be there when they do. Kids say over and over that we don't understand. Why don't we see if we can prove them wrong once in a while. ~~ Chris Crutcher |
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